"It's now widely accepted that taxonomies are a critical piece of the organization's content infrastructure," said Wordmap CEO Bill Hutchison. "But developing them is not easy without the help of a specialized software package. The new Wordmap ASP service gives companies an enormous kick-start to taxonomy development at a very reasonable cost."

Users can upload their own taxonomy datasets from plain text, XML, or ISO standard formats, and the Wordmap system creates a visual environment in which they can be managed and enhanced. If users don't have existing taxonomies, Wordmap makes its own datasets available for them to work with. They can then add new material to their taxonomies and reshape and structure them.

"Wordmap supports the advanced features that most systems neglect," said Jeremy Ellman, Wordmap's chief technology officer. "The ability to store and display multilingual versions of your taxonomies in Unicode, for example, is a key strength of the Wordmap product. Or the capability to insert ad hoc links between subject areas, which is crucial for adding richness to the data, and providing context and cross-reference for users."

The Wordmap system automatically converts the taxonomy into a Web metasearch site unique to each customer. The taxonomy acts as a query-expansion layer between users and search sources, clarifying and enriching queries. According to the announcement, enriched user input translates readily to enhanced search results.

Source: Wordmap, Bath, U.K., 011-44-1225-358182; http://www.wordmap.com.